What is project management?
In summary, project management is a combination of essential skills that involve planning and strategizing to execute an idea to its best potential. Project management may sound like a concept that is specific to project managers—but the closer we look at it, the more we find that its skills are applicable, and essential, to almost anyone who wants to achieve a goal in a thoughtful manner.
As passionate art students, leveraging your academical years to actively practise project management will benefit you greatly after graduation. The creative industry demands innovation—consequently, it is a high-stakes environment that holds high expectations for produced work.
Project management skills are a broad subject, but it can be deemed that the following five skills are the standards:
Communication
Time Management
Adaptability
Leadership
Prioritisation
How is Project Management Essential to Everyone?
The basics of project management are applicable to most, if not all, areas of expertise. The skills and main takeaways of project management are transferrable across different contexts—which is helpful, considering its universal importance.
By applying the aforementioned project management skills and practices, you’re less likely to:
1. Miss deadlines: If your plans are miscalculated, you can start falling behind on your timeline. Failing to complete projects in a timely manner can result in a poorer reputation.
2. Run over budget: You may need to buy more things than you had planned for. Spending more than what you intended to can potentially lower the profit you receive from this project.
3. Stress out yourself, and your team: Plans can fall apart if you aren’t careful—this can cause distress within a team. Tension and demotivation could reflect on the quality and efficiency of a project.
And you can benefit from:
1. Better quality: When you have sufficiently planned vital aspects of your project, like time, materials and assignees—you’re more likely to produce something of better quality due to the lack of constraints.
2. Confident team members: If you show your team thoughtful and meticulous compositions, team members can feel more secure in the work they’re doing. Team morale and motivation goes up—crucial to avoiding creative burnouts.
3. Greater operational efficiency: When your plan manages to streamline processes, you could cut down unnecessary costs—increasing the potential profit you earn from your hard work.
Why should Art Students Start Practicing Project Management?
But you may be asking, how does this apply to art students? Reasons range from present-day to future considerations. Throughout university you’re bound to be assigned school projects, big or small—and applying project management skills to this can help you achieve work-life balance. And starting now, in a relatively more controlled and less volatile environment than the working world, you’re able to build a solid foundation of basic soft and hard skills. It’ll contribute to kickstarting your career in the creative industry.
Let’s pick apart how applying project management skills in the present and future helps:
Your Present
Adaptability skills: You and your plans should be able to adapt to any sudden changes. This may include leaving buffer time for tasks or being willing to change details—this is important for your creative growth. You’re in an environment best for experimentation and exploration of yourself as an artist, so take advantage of it. Learn and make mistakes—because trial and error is what makes creating art rewarding.
Prioritisation skills: Take time to figure out a hierarchy of all your responsibilities. If you look at all tasks with equal importance, you’ll overwhelm yourself and burn out—a state students like yourself are already vulnerable to. If you’re able to efficiently execute this form of task management, you’re more likely to maintain a desirable grade—while still having time for things outside of academics.
Your Future
Communication skills: Communication in project management refers to the sharing of ideas, opinions, progress updates and feedback between members of a team. Efficient communication saves time, resources and helps increase teamwork—a positive that’s bound to leave a mark in your future resumes.
Time management skills: Essentially, this helps to ensure timely completion and reduces wastage. Being able to organise and set personal goals to secure punctuality is a soft skill that’s undeniably important to the health of your future career(s). Having this project management skill under your belt shows that you’re reliable and independent—while talent and creativity is important, so is discipline.
You don’t have to learn project management skills and execute them all by yourself—there are applications out there to help lower learning curves. Additionally, you’d have the added benefit of enriching your portfolio with this. For instance, if you’re aim to become an animator, most animation studios have a dedicated project management tool they use to manage a team, so if you show that you have experience with one—it’ll show that you can adopt similar applications faster.
How can Art Students Use TESSR to Develop Project Management Skills?
TESSR is a project management tool, built for creatives. We have a free plan, in consideration to art students or studios that can’t currently make financial commitments. Here’s how you can use TESSR to start managing your artwork—and to apply project management skills outside of theory.
Stay ahead of Deadlines
In TESSR, you can personalise notifications to suit your needs. Understandably, art projects or tasks could slip past your mind when you have to juggle a hundred other things at once. Being an art student is no easy feat, but keeping notifications on to remind you or your team about an approaching deadline or latest updates could help you stay on top of your game.
Plan and Assign Work
Splitting up work is a dreadful part of task management, within school projects. People can be indecisive—or simply forgetful of their part in an artwork because of the other assignments from different modules. You can make this a little less daunting through the clear allocation of tasks in TESSR—simply click on the “Assignee” icon to issue a scene to your peers. With this, there will be no more pointing fingers about who was supposed to be responsible for what.
Communicate Effectively
With the stress and pressure of art school, communicating effectively could be difficult—which can be worsened with poorly nuanced texts or comments. However, all uploaded artwork on TESSR can be reviewed—annotate directly on work with colourful tools and shapes or exchange ideas through voice messages, to ensure messages are relayed clearly and concisely.
Keep Track of Progress
It can be hard to keep tabs on how your art project is progressing—and as an art student, visualising project data can make this a little less tedious. TESSR has a few ways to provide information about your project and your team in a way that’s easy on the eyes. Through treemaps, bar and donut charts, your numerical data is more digestible. The donut-shaped Woo-hoo chart in particular may be the most relevant feature to your needs—through set metrics, you’re able to see the completion rate of a school project.
Overview
Project management skills will grow to be an indispensable part of your work ethic. With practise and discipline, you’ll get the hang of it in no time. We hope this has helped you gain a better grasp on how to personally handle project and task management.
Author Bio
From Malaysia, Leia Emeera is a writer at TESSR, and a published author. She has been putting pen to paper ever since she learned how to, and has an anthology to her name, titled 'Ten'. Leia loves music, games and her beloved labrador retriever, George. She aims to further her studies in English Literature and Creative Writing the moment her gap year ends. 'Till then, you will find her sitting behind a desk, writing with TESSR.
Connect with her on LinkedIn: Leia Emeera
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